November 8, 2014

I had to look up Nicholas Sparks. Which movies are Nicholas Sparks movies? Looking at that list of movies — none of which I've seen — I'm reminded of the horribleness of movies. I guess I have some empathy — me, being a woman — for males who endure this kind of stuff, presumably to please their woman, as Glenn Beck has 2 or 3 times. And maybe his wife finds this kind of after-the-show riffing hilarious or is at least comfortable...

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“A man whose unconquerable will and boundless determination carved a lusty, rough, and boisterous slice of history called…The Searchers…It’s John Wayne as Ethan Edwards who had a rare kind of courage, the courage that simply keeps on and on far beyond all reasonable endurance, never thinking of himself as martyred, never thinking of himself as brave….Here is a story of a man—hard and relentless, tender and passionate.”

ADVENTURE FROM THE SAND-CHOKED DESERT OF ARIZONA

“Here is drama, great love, and aching loneliness.”

IN THE BREATHTAKING PANORAMA OF VISTA-VISION

A family living in an eerie wasteland is slain, the only survivor a girl child abducted by a savage and deformed king. Mad with revenge, her uncle Ethan wanders the wilderness for five years, searching for her, driven by remorse, guilt, and grief. He is a dissolute knight of a vanquished army, possibly a thief, and may be her father, having cuckolded his brother eight years earlier.

At last, his half-breed squire slays the monster. After ensuring the savage's spirit will never find no rest (by scalping him), the aging knight sweeps the princess away in his arms, placing her in the care of a loving elderly couple whose virginal daughter the squire weds.

Order returned to the world, the hero returns to the hostile wilderness, forever an outcast.

Also, that RightWingWatch.org is really something. It is ironic that people who pride themselves on "empathy" would dedicate a web site to the invidious interpretation of the thoughts of their fellow Americans.

I go out to movies with friends occasionally, and we take turns picking what we will see. One night someone else picked "The Last Song." Near the end the girl was standing in the church and light from a stained glass window that her recently dead father had made bathed her in a golden glow, and she looked into the light and said, "Thank you, Daddy," and that was it for me. It was so maudlin. Everyone was crying, and I started laughing (keeping as quiet as possible), and my friends seeing this, their faces soaked with tears, started laughing too. We had a good time.

They're saying this is "transphobic".Arrgh. It's so clearly a joke. The joke is Nicholas Sparks makes chick flicks. And no guy is going to watch them without, at some point, losing his masculinity. The whole "not that there's anything wrong with that is clearly them riffing on Seinfeld.Learn to take a joke people. No one LITERALLY loses their penis if they watch a Sparks movie.

The Notebook was actually a pretty good movie. But part of it was that when viewing it you weren't aware of the Nicholas Sparks formula. Seeing a few more Nicholas Sparks movies you realize how manipulative they are and how much they follow the Nicholas Sparks formula.

The other part was that Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands are phenomenal actors and can turn treacle into pathos. The earlier story with Gosling and what's her face? was anyone really moved by THAT portion of the movie? No it was at the end.

Someone else mentioned that only brits can pull off certain types of parts. They used Ian Mckellan as an example of how he turned badly written, bombastic characters like Gandalf and Magneto with their hammy dialogue into believable characters simply through acting ability. And if you just read the dialogue on paper you see how hammy it actually is. There may be some truth to that. imagine someone not of McKellan's caliber doing Magneto. And he might come across as "Standard comic book villain". Or, as the Rolling Stones said ages ago "It's the singer, not the song".

If Sparks would throw a lesbian or two in to his books, he would probably win a Nobel Prize. I've seen about half of the movies and they are okay. I enjoyed this last one. What the critics and sophisticates don't like is that they are all about love between opposite sexes and the tragedies of normal life.

I'm sure there are a lot of stupid degenerates and weak and unstable men and women who never fared very well with the opposite sex who can find plenty of fault with Sparks and Beck. The acrimony in our culture toward anything decent and normal could have been prevented if we had just given all the unattractive girls second maid in a homecoming court and all the young men two more inches of penis and a couple of dates before they were 25.

I loved "A Walk to Remember" because -- at that time -- I was a Mandy Moore stalker. I interpreted that movie as her acknowledgment that she would die without my love. I used to bid on her used panties on eBay, I can admit it now, I've had help. Plus: she grew older. Bubble popped. I can't be there when the butt sags.

After Mandy Moore I began to stalk Gwen Stefani. If you start with a thin butt there is less to sag as time passes. Her bodyguards are less gentle: I liked her better when she just surrounded herself with Japanese schoolgirls. I thought she did that for me; my lawyer says no she didn't.

I like to think that, in an alternate Universe, Gwen Stefani and Mandy Moore made sweet, sweet love. And I was just the guy who brought room service into their hotel suite for them. They were only wearing towels at that point. I have a thing about chicks' towels.

So here, it seems, are the movies based on Sparks's novels: Safe Haven (2013), Dear John (2010), The Last Song (2010), The Notebook (2004), The Lucky One (2012), A Walk To Remember (2002), Message In A Bottle (1999), Nights In Rodanthe (2008), The Best Of Me (2014), The Longest Ride (2015). They are purportedly listed in order of popularity, and the last one hasn't been released yet.

I've seen two of them: The Notebook, to which I referred earlier, and Nights In Rodanthe, which I thought was awful.

I'm a guy. I have a wife, who is a woman. If she likes a chick flick, I go to a chick flick with her. This is not a threat to my masculinity. It is one of the sacrifices that a man make for his woman. There are sacrifices that a woman makes for her man. These are called relationships. Dig it, Beck?

I once ran into George Michael in a public restroom. Needless to say, we had a misunderstanding of terms: when he said 'blow job' I didn't realize he meant 'BLOW JOB-blow job'. Los Angeles is confusing.